Large parts of it are, along with river valleys in the outlying municipality. People live in those river valleys. Though I'm a ways away, the valley below my property is part of that system. To give another visual, I took the picture below when the eye of the hurricane was over us, so we had yet to deal with the worst of it, which was the second half. The lake you see below is the valley below the house, where there is usually only a small river that can barely be seen from my house.
Yeah, I was wondering that as well. The dam issue has been being discussed ever since the hurricane, but I assumed, because it didn't burst, that it was okay and would be repaired soon. This is not reassuring news.
There isn't much you can do to prevent it, so I assume you're doing a lot of thinking about how to escape, if need be. Is there yet higher ground you could get to fairly easily? I assume you've still got a car and access to petrol?
Even were the worst to happen, my house is quite high up. That picture is cropped in so you could see the floodplain better. It's actually pretty far below me. I know all the ways to get out of the neighborhood that keep me up along the hills, as these are the roads that were least affected during the storm and now serve as the detours from the main road, PR-111. The real issue is for folks who live down in those valleys. Some of the homes you see in that image were more than waist-deep in water after the worst of the storm. ETA: Some might ask why people would live in areas where danger is so eminent, and the answer is simple economics. Properties at higher elevations where there's enough flat terrain to put "four on the floor" (as they say in California) can be very pricey since the island is small and land is at a premium. Properties in low lying areas are more affordable. This also leads to a strangely flipped perspective as regards beach-front properties. Back in the day only the very poorest of the poor lived close to the water (google La Perla, San Juan as an example) because of the danger of storms. It's still a present-day mindset that is only slowly giving way to the more Americanized view of beach-front being prime real estate.
